Government Should ‘Immediately’ Defund Police, Says British Sociologist

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 07: Protesters gather outside Downing Street during a Black
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Kurt Zindulka

A British sociology professor has outlined the areas of policing that he believes the government should “immediately” defund, with the ultimate goal of completely eliminating law enforcement in the United Kingdom.

Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, a sociologist at the University of Greenwich, said that funding for the police should be diverted into “women’s refuges, youth services and greater funding for mental health provision, particularly for young people” over the next year.

In an interview with Vice magazine, Elliott-Cooper pinpointed four areas of law enforcement currently carried out by London’s Metropolitan Police that should be divested immediately.

Under the sociologist’s scheme, the first aspect of policing that should be defunded is “drugs policing and drugs stop and search” which he claims disproportionately impacts people of minority backgrounds.

“The second one would be disbanding the Prevent agenda,” which aims to deradicalise primarily young people who are at risk of joining extremist groups or committing acts of terror.

Elliott-Cooper claimed that the strategy “has been used to criminalise lots of communities,” of non-white backgrounds, as a major focus of the programme is on radical Islamic terror.

The disproportionality of racial makeup in those targeted by Prevent under suspicion of being vulnerable to jihadi movements may be explained, perhaps, by the fact that just eight per cent of Britain’s Islamic population is white.

In 2019, Professor of Human Rights at the University of Bristol Steven Greer noted that even “the European Court of Human Rights has held, if a terrorist threat emanates from a particular minority, the fact that counter-terrorist initiatives impact disproportionately upon it does not, for this reason alone, mean that its members have suffered discrimination”.

The third area of policing that Elliot-Cooper has targeted for defunding are operations taken against gangs in the capital, which again he claims criminalises “mainly Black communities” and is in his estimation very costly.

Last year, London saw its highest number of murders in a decade, with 149 people dying in homicides under the watch of Mayor Sadiq Khan. The spike in numbers was largely a result of increased levels of violence committed by criminal gangs, which were responsible for nearly a third of all murders in 2019.

The final area of policing he targetted for removal was the so-called ‘hostile environment policy’ that seeks to disincentivise illegal migrants from remaining in the country.

“The way in which the police are raiding homes, workplaces, and institutions, just to try to find people who are undocumented – and immigration deportations and detentions. They make no improvement on public safety, and are very resource-intensive,” Elliot-Cooper claimed.

According to the immigration pressure group, Migration Watch UK, some 70,000 illegal migrants enter the country every year. The group also reported that 77 per cent of the public see illegal immigration as a ‘serious problem’.

The government has admitted that every illegal migrant “costs the taxpayer between £4,255 and £7,820 per year through the use of public services such as health, education and welfare benefits”, displaces native-born British job seekers, and bolsters the ranks of organised crime in the country.

A former Metropolitan police officer turned anti-racism campaigner, Adam Pugh, admitted that the campaign to defund the police would likely be a several-year project, saying: “There is no quick-fix solution. There can only be a long term strategy with regards to abolition or defunding the police as a strategy.”

“The point is that policing isn’t working, and will never work – I say that as somebody who has been a police officer. Reform hasn’t been working for a long time,” Pugh said.

“We now need to move beyond reform and begin to reimagine what our entire justice system might look like, taking steps towards the actualisation of that goal,” he added.

The call to defund the police comes amidst growing pressure from the radical leftist Black Lives Matter movement that has engulfed the country in protests following the death of American George Floyd. The British branch of the movement BLMUK has raised over $1 million in a crowdfunding campaign that promises to spend the money on the “abolition of the police”.

Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka

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